Smell the Love

Nobody goes out with maraca players.

After the first or seventeenth timea rock star has loved and dumped you without a word—and there you are thinking you're all crazy because you must have imagined that you and the rock star had a tendre going—you recognize the danger in these beautiful egomaniacs. You now know better than to get entangled with a rock star again. And you still know better, even as another rock star is looking deep into your eyes and you are surrendering for the second or eighteenth time.

How did you get this way? Back in 1977, you didn't need the actual Leif Garrett. It was enough to kiss his poster over the bed. But you didn't learn the lesson in this story of long-distance love through glossy facsimile: cherish rock stars from afar.

And after you have been loved and wordlessly dumped again—after showing up at gigs, happy and fluttery, while he was looking right through you—you'll start believing that you really are crazy and just made up the whole thing in your crazy, crazy head, which is obviously crazy. Even Pamela Anderson isn't as crazy as you because at least she wasn't imagining she was married to Tommy Lee.

Why do intelligent, attractive young women get suckered over and over by these no-good dirty dogs? It's a question we frequently whine among ourselves. There are as many answers as there are girls with cartoon hearts in thought bubbles over their heads. But there are a few general traits.

There is the fact that these boys are somewhat seedy, and so they must be sexually knowing. There is the sensi- tivity, hidden like a little boy's, that just needs mothering. There is the eye contact—lots and lots of eye contact. Like Irishmen, rock stars know the power of impaling you with a look. There is the power of the spotlight—any spotlight—which is why girls love their professors and their bartenders and their dentists, too. There is the hope that someday there will be reflected fame. And there is the tortured soul that needs only you for a balm.

You imagine you could be his Yoko. You imagine you could be his Vitamin U.